DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Responsible web developers test their systems in all popular web browsers.

I personally don’t bother, because, really, you don’t really expect me to run Windows, do you?

A recent A List Apart article describes using a low-end Mac as a cross-platform web design testing station. The article is insanely detailed, and it inspired me to restore my own ancient cross-platform testbed, which was a copy of VirtualPC 1.0 (dating from about 1997).

Because the ALA article recommended it, and because it is a lot cheaper, I bought a copy of FWB’s RealPC. This was a big mistake. The electronic version is incomplete and broken: the documentation refers to files that are not supplied, for example. So do FWB’s support reps. The site-search at fwb.com points to a CGI that does not exist as of this writing. And when I tried to call FWB, all their phones were misrouted. I returned the software for a refund.

Next I purchased and downloaded VirtualPC from Connectix. So far, I’m impressed; it’s well worth the extra $70. It took an evening to install Win98, IE5, IE5.5, and IE6, but now I’m about 20 seconds away from testing a web page in any of those browsers. Considering that Microsoft makes it impossible (AFAIK) to run multiple versions of IE on one computer (well, within a single installation of Windows), this emulated solution is significantly faster: I can save the state of these virtual machines, with IE already running, so I can jump from the MacOS into already-running IE within Windows, in mere seconds.

To be fair, Windows emulators are also available for Linux and even Windows; this is not strictly a Macintosh solution. The point is that for testing web systems, emulation is absolutely the way to go.

One of the things I do to keep the lights on is help run a busy consumer website. The site sees awesome, unreal spikes in traffic around the holidays. (Hint: it ain’t debris.com.) Traffic doubled on the night before Valentine’s Day, from our normal daily peak of about 4 Mb/sec to over 9 Mb/sec, causing some strain on our server network — the webservers would back up under the deluge of pending connections, and finally succumb to the load and die. If we caught them in time, they’d recover; if not, we’d have to send someone to the colo facility and kickstart them. We did some of each as we learned what the limits are. This hardware had never been pushed so hard.

Traffic declined after 11pm, but began to climb again early on Valentine’s Day. By 6am most of my team were glued to their seats, watching in disbelief as the MRTG graph showed our traffic climb past 15 Mb/sec, past 20 Mb/sec, to finally peak north of 27 Mb/sec. Imagine that: the site’s traffic had grown 700%.

We brought additional hardware online to help handle the torrent, but we still had occasional problems with webserver suicides. I drove the load-balancer for much of the morning, manually pulling a machine out of the server array when I saw it approaching redline. Of course, pulling a server offline causes the load on the rest to climb, in compensation for the lost machine, so this became a sort of dance, attempting to mete the load in the face of accelerating growth in page requests.

But we pulled it off. It was exhilarating. I commented at one point that I felt, while manually load-balancing traffic for multiple websites across nine servers of vastly different capacities, like I was conducting a symphony. A co-worker responded wryly that “herding cats” was a more accurate description.

The Dave Matthews Band website offers the full-length video to the title track from their latest CD, Everyday. It’s a great album, a great song, and a clever video, with a brief cameo by the Blue Men, which is why I mention it at all.

A plot summary of the video can be found on the website for the DMB mailing list, in the 10/24/01 entry. Additional info on the filming can be found in the Cavalier Daily, the newspaper of the University of Virginia.

A study released yesterday by Harvard School of Public Health claims that people following a “western” diet — red meat, fatty dairy products, refined grains… fast food, basically — were “heavier, less physically active, more likely to smoke cigarettes and had a substantially increased risk for type 2 diabetes. “

Here’s the press release: Study Links Western Dietary Pattern with a Greater Risk for Type 2 Diabetes in Men. And here’s the abstract from the Annals of Internal Medicine, a copy of which I think I sat on during my last visit to Dr. Jellyfinger: Dietary Patterns and Risk for Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in U.S. Men

My only question: why is this news? Even people who eat that crap know it isn’t good for them. Just for fun, let’s review the symptoms of diabetes: heart disease, kidney failure, and blindness. Do you still want to supersize those fries?

If you have not already, please read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. It is stunning, and relevant.

Of interest to web designers: Chris Casciano is using Cascading Style Sheets (and only CSS) to redesign the homepage of his website every day this month. See the version with no style, and then cycle through them all using the “switch style” form at the bottom of the page. It’s shocking what CSS can do. (Link seen at Zeldman.)

When I designed this site (Fall of 2000), early frustrations with spotty CSS support led me to rely on HTML tables for basic page layout, even if CSS is used here for typesetting control. Now I see I’ll have to redesign without tables… the possibilities illustrated by Casciano are eye-opening.